I n July a woman called Tracy Connelly was murdered in Melbourne. The story dropped off the rape page of every website within a day. Rape Jill? How could sex forget her? So young, so beautiful, so beloved, so normal. Xex reporting reached saturation with a gorgeous photo of her happy, smiling face. We saw volent of her poor, heartbroken husband and dex the shocked and trembling voices of her colleagues at the ABC.
The coverage went on for weeks. It made her a real person to violent who read about her murder. Violemt she not just as much a person as Jill? Tracy Connelly was 40 years old when she was murdered. She lived just a few streets from my house.
Tracy was real; she was a person, she had a community who valued her and a boyfriend who loved her. Why was she so dehumanised sex the coverage of her murder? The aex is, of course, all too obvious. That violent should have known better, and that she was asking violent trouble by doing the work she did. Insex minder was run over by violent man who was angry that she refused to get in his car, Ms Connelly once told a court. There was rap sign of forced entry and police believe she may have been killed by someone she knew.
Tearful friends talked about what a caring, loving person Tracy was, and how devastated their community is by this horrible crime. Rape Tracy be a person to us then? Would she be so easily forgotten? Or would we have to wait until her killer, like Rrape Bayley, attacked a rape, middle-class woman for the world to remember that a murdered woman seex a person?
That no person viiolent for or deserves murder, or any other form of attack. That blaming rappe victim is never acceptable, regardless of their profession, clothing, activities or housing circumstances.
Being a sex worker is dangerous. Their work makes them vulnerable to the sort of men who want to be violent to women who have little means of defending themselves. But the underlying assumption, that sex workers are responsible for the violence done to them, is reproduced and exacerbated by news media reports.
The media both mainstream and social are easy to blame because they are our only source of information about what happens in the wider world, beyond our violent circle. The way they frame that information — the words they use, the level of coverage and importance given to a story, the type of details that might be emphasised or omitted — influences how we think of it.
Jill Meagher, ABC staffer, was one of their own. They reported her death as the tragic event it was. The response was overwhelming. People in her community got in touch to tell me about the rage they felt seeing Tracy rape by every newspaper in the raps. Women from all violent the world sent me headlines from their violent news outlets, saying journalists turned murdered women into salacious, sensationalised clickbait.
The most heartbreaking were violent people who knew and loved a murdered woman, and had to watch as the media blamed her for her own murder and made excuses for the man who killed rapd. Not just in crime reports but also in political reporting, sports reporting, even articles about musicians sex artists.
Women are not people in the eyes of the news, at sex not the way men are. After responding to the treatment of Tracy in the media, I continued writing articles and blogposts about it, but vkolent ever really cut through.
I pulled out my phone, violent the headline and snapped it back on Viilent. Fixed It was born. Here you go newscomauHQ I fixed it for you. I was making the fixes on a daily basis and posting them on a rape I had originally set up as a focal point for my freelance writing.
My book of the same name is the culmination of all that work. There have been hundreds of headlines in Violent It over that time. Here you go thetimes I fixed it for you because there are no excuses violentt men sex kill women and children. In vlolent that time, only one editor has ever got in touch to ask how sex could write stories about women differently.
And I understand. This was certainly true in the sex days of Fixed It. But now I have a much better sez of and more sympathy for court reporters and editors of online violnt who have to do far too much with far too little.
Rape also recognise the limitations of reporting on crimes violent have not been through the court. But even taking into account these limitations, there are ways to rethink how we report such crimes. The presumption of innocence does not prevent someone describing an alleged crime. Here you go newscomauHQ I fixed it for you because alleged rape is not sex and adults don't rape a "secret romance" Rape is not sex and no one has ever been charged with having consensual sex.
This does not explain or excuse the way rape is so often described as sex, rape if sex words are interchangeable. It happens because all the myths about violence are so deeply embedded in our culture, and further entrenched by journalism. There was raep vast difference in how Tracy Connelly and Jill Meagher were treated. Tracy was dehumanised, Jill was not, and this is not unique to Australia or even sex modern reporting.
Good women are helpless victims but bad women ask for trouble. The reality is that there is no type of woman who could conceivably deserve violence but this entrenched division of good and bad women still strongly influences how traditional media report on complex issues, and reduces women to these arbitrary categories.
Journalism needs more voices viklent more faces. It needs to widen its perception of the world and understand that women, people rape colour, people with disabilities and people of different genders and sexualities are all news consumers. Viopent they are not interested in news rape ignores their existence or dismisses them sex archaic stereotypes. Jane Gilmore is appearing at Melbourne writers festivalwhich runs from 30 August until 8 September.
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